My new iPhone 6 is perfect in every way…except for the fact that persons on the other end of the call can't hear me when the phone is NOT on speakerphone.

I can use Siri and Dictation just fine. But be heard on phone calls without having to switch to speakerphone, I cannot.

My buddy and I had a long call Friday night and he kept telling me that he could barely hear me. At first, I thought this might have something to do with the phone being new and me not being used to it or needing burn in or some other some such thing. But I got the same complaint when I made an appointment with a local business on Saturday. And then, apparently, the mic quit working altogether this morning when making non-speakerphone calls.

One theory is that there are two microphones on the phone, one on the bottom for talking, the other on the back of the phone for collecting ambient noise to perform noise canceling during calls. Perhaps, when using other apps aside from the actual phone, the noise canceling microphone can provide audio for the aforementioned functions, thus explaining the discrepancy.

I have tried turning up the volume on the phone during the call which increases microphone sensitivity, but this has not worked. Neither has restarting the phone. The only software thing left for me to do is perform a backup, then a factory restore and begin again. While I could do this and will do so if the Genius Bar so directs me to do so, I think there is a hardware problem that will only be resolved by swapping the handset.

I made an appointment with the Apple Store. But the earliest appointment I could get was Friday evening.

I still think that the iPhone 6 is too wide and too tall. I wanted the hardware in the iPhone 6 as we as its capacity. While there were times when I used my iPhone 5S and thought that the screen on that phone was a bit small, I think Apple has really went overboard with their new phones. Not surprisingly, they broke yet another sales record, selling 10 million units this past weekend and according to that same press release,

While our team managed the manufacturing ramp better than ever before, we could have sold many more iPhones with greater supply and we are working hard to fill orders as quickly as possible.

whester thinks that the reason I wan't able to get an appointment sooner is that Apple knew they wouldn't have any units in stock to trade my handset for a working handset until the end of this week; while I hate to agree with him because he came up with the idea, I wouldn't be surprised if there were some truth in this.

There is something else that I don't like about the new phone. But this is something that would have plagued any new handset I would have gotten: over the past year, my iPhone 5S had built up many data points about locations I frequent and thus would tell me how long it would take to arrive at a place through Notification Center even though I had not implicitly requested the data. The new handset, however, has no such data and is having to rebuild the data points.

At first glance, you might ask, "Why doesn't the backup of the old phone contain that data?" But upon reflection, you will reach the conclusion that I did: namely, that if location data were stored in the backup and not on the handset itself (presumably in a secure location such as Secure Enclave) then it would be "trivial" to extract such data from said backup, making backups of the device even more of a security risk they they already are. (There is some cleverly-worded quote about how backups are some insecure snapshot of a point of time in your life, but I can't remember either the quote or the source. Alas.)

So, over all, I'm pleased with the increase in capacity. It's hard to tell if the phone is faster or if I just think its faster because its newer, despite Apple's claim that the iPhone 6 has a 25% faster CPU than the iPhone 5S. (But I can tell you that I have noticed that the UP app does seem to update its data faster upon launch than it did on the 5S, though there has been a time or two when the progress bar has crawled upon the screen. I have thought in these instances that the app was waiting on the bracelet and the phone to sync and transmit data betwixt themselves, but I have no empirical proof of this.) Thankfully, my copy of iPhone 6 has not been plagued with slow wifi or battery drains, but then, I am planning on trading my copy in at the end of the week for a new copy: I understand that my warranty is limited, my mileage may vary, past performance does not guarantee future performance, the offer is void where prohibited and I should see a participating dealer for details. But for the time being, if anything, I have noticed that wifi speeds are improved on the new handset. I wonder if anything to do with running a Time Capsule at home. I have also thought that the phone might be using LTE and wifi simultaneously and I have not experienced any problems because I don't live in one of the three cities (LA, NYC, SF) that dominate the tech press and thus the general populace's experience of new technology roll-outs.

Samsung S5 vs iPhone 6

I haven't seen or played with the iPhone 6 yet, but in the ~4ish months that I've had my Samsung S5 (upgraded from iPhone 4s) I haven't had any issues. The "remembering" feature you speak of is indeed useful, and comes with the S5 as well. While I understand why the data points don't/won't transfer between handsets, as you highlight, it will be frustrating until you build them up again. Maybe if those places are saved as specific locations on cloud profiles (e.g. Google Maps) the lapse between old handset and new handset could be reduced.

One of the principal reasons why I decided to jump manufacturers is the size of the screen. Even though I had heard rumors about the iPhone 6 being larger, I didn't want to wait - plus I like keeping Texas and I on the same upgrade cycle, or as near as possible. And her Samsung S2 was on the verge of death.

I'll be really interested to see tech specs/performance comparisons between the iPhone 6 and Samsung S5. Then if user experience confirms the tech lab results.